Do you work for the ultimate rebel, satan?
If you want to track
a civilization as it collapses, watch what happens to the concept of the rebel.
From the 1960s
onward---starting with Lee Oswald and the assassination of JFK---the whole idea
of "the rebel" with power has been sequentially updated and
repackaged. This is intentional.
The objective is to
equate "rebel" with a whole host of qualities---e.g., runaway
self-serving paranoia; random destruction; out-of-control drug use; generalized
hatred; the commission of crimes...
On a lesser,
"commercialized" level, the new rebel can define himself by merely
showing up at a concert to scream and drink heavily and break something, having
already dressed to make a dissident fashion statement. He can take an afternoon
off from college classes and have his arms tattooed. All the while, of course,
he functions as an avid consumer of mainstream corporate products.
You even have people
who, considering themselves rebels of the first order, support a government
that spies on its people 24/7, launches military attacks all over the world,
and now funds a Manhattan Project to map every move of the 100 billion neurons
of the brain, for the ultimate purpose of controlling it.
Even going back as
far as the 1950s, the so-called decade of conformity, psyops professionals
sculpted notions of The Rebel: He was the person who didn't want to take part
in the emerging bland corporate culture.
He was imagined and
presented as troubled, morose; a wobbly unfocused JD Salinger Holden Caulfield,
or a beatnik, a Madison Avenue caricature of somebody who opposed Madison
Avenue.
In other words, the
people who were shaping the consumer culture were creating the image of the
rebel as a cartoon figure who just didn't want to buy into "the good
life."
Time Magazine ran a
cover story on the beatniks, and characterized them as a disaffected trend.
Marlon Brando, heading up a bunch of moronic motorcycle riders, invaded a town
of pleasant clueless citizens and took it over, wreaking destruction. The 1953
movie was The Wild One. James Dean, who had the same trouble Brando did in
articulating a complete sentence, was "the rebel without a cause" in
the "iconic film" of the same name. He raced cars toward cliffs
because his father couldn't understand him.
These were all puff
pieces designed to make rebels look ridiculous, and they worked. They also
functioned to transmit the idea to young people that being a rebel should be a
showbiz affectation. That worked, too.
Then the late 1960s
arrived. Flower children rebels, in part invented by the major media, would
surely take over the world and dethrone fascist authority with rainbows. San
Francisco was the epicenter. But Haight-Ashbury, where the flowers and the weed
were magically growing out of the sidewalks, turned into a speed, acid, and
heroin nightmare, a playground for psychopaths to cash in and steal and destroy
lives. The CIA, of course, gave the LSD culture a major push.
For all that the
anti-war movement eventually accomplished in ending the Vietnam war-crime, in
the aftermath many of those college students who had been in the streets---once
the fear of being drafted was gone---scurried into counselors' offices to see
where they might fit into the job market after graduation. The military
industrial complex took its profits and moved on, undeterred.
The idea of the rebel
was gone. It later resurfaced as The Cocaine Dealer, the archangel of the
1980s.
And so forth and so
on. All these incarnations of The Rebel were artificially created and sustained
as psyops. At bottom, the idea was to discredit the Individual, in favor of The
Group.
Now, in our
collectivist society of 2017, The Group, as a rapidly expanding victim class,
is the government's number one project. It's a straight con. "We're here
to make you worse off while we lift you up."
In the psyop to
demean, distort, and squash the rebel, there is a single obvious common
denominator: the establishment media are doing the defining; they are the ones
who are setting the parameters and making the descriptions; they are the ones
who build the cartoons; looking down their noses, pretending to a degree of
sympathy, they paint one unflattering picture after another of what the rebel
is and does and says; they have co-opted the whole game.
These days, the ultimate
rebels, the media would have you believe, are "gun-toting racist bitter
clingers who have religion." Another attempt to shape a distorted
unflattering portrait
You can take a whole
host of political films and television series of the past 50 years, and look at
them for signs of the Rebel: Seven Days in May, Advise and Consent, The
Candidate, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, Dave, Primary Colors, The Contender,
Good Night and Good Luck, The American President, West Wing, Scandal, The
Newsroom...
Good acting, bad
acting, drama, message---at the end you're looking for the core. What do the
rebel heroes really stand for? What are their principles? It's all bland. It's
vague. It has the posturing of importance, but little else.
As I was finishing
this piece, a friend wrote with a quote attributed to Robert Anton Wilson:
"The universe is a war between reality programmers."
This is exactly where
the real rebel enters the scene. He's not trying to program people. Freedom
means cutting loose from programming.
The Rebel doesn't go
to the market and choose which reality program he wants. They're all used up as
soon as they come out of the package.
Albert Camus once
wrote: "The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi
of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of
tyranny a good conscience. It would be easy, however, to destroy that good
conscience by shouting to them: if you want the happiness of the people, let
them speak out and tell what kind of happiness they want and what kind they
don't want! But, in truth, the very ones who make use of such alibis know they
are lies; they leave to their intellectuals on duty the chore of believing in
them and of proving that religion, patriotism, and justice need for their
survival the sacrifice of freedom."
"THIS or
THAT" is the history of Earth: choose reality program A or B. The choice
was always a con.
We're well into a
time period when the experts and scientific authorities are settling on the
human being as a biological machine that can only respond to programming.
That's their view and their default position.
It's sheer madness,
of course, but what else do you expect? We're in an intense technological age,
and people are obsessed with making things run smoother. They treat their
precious little algorithms for control like the Crown Jewels. They're terribly
enthusiastic about the problem they're solving, and that problem is us.
We're the wild cards,
a fact which they take to be result of our improper and incomplete
conditioning. They aim to fix that.
"Why not stop
diddling around and just make the whole thing over? Why not reshape
humans?"
Having decided that,
the battle begins between competing programmers of the mind. Which program for
humans is better?
The rebel is against
all such programming, no matter how "good and right" it sounds.
"Good" and "right" are the traps.
The ultimate
rebellion is against programming, whatever it looks like, wherever it occurs.
Programming is
someone else's idea of who and what you should be.
It is never your
idea.
Your idea is where
the power is.
There are some people
who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun.
This lone word makes
them see something majestic and untamed and astonishing.
They feel the sound
of a Niagara approaching.
They suddenly know
why they are alive.
Most people don't
want to travel to that grand arena because they have been trained like pets by
some sector of this society to be good little girls and boys.
The truth is, if
people want to live the creative existence, they have to be willing to
destroy---and the main thing that awaits their destruction is their own
illusions and their commitment to the World of Nice where doily power is the
only power. Where that tired phrase, "the approval of others," is the
guiding precept and the stick of fear.
The creative life
isn't about little changes done in little penguin steps. It's about putting
your arms and your mind around Deep, Big, and Wide Desire. It's about making
that Desire come to life.
99% of the world has
been trained like rats to adore systems. Give them a system and they're ready
to cuddle up and take it all in. If they have questions, or if they want to
argue, it's about how to tweak the system to make it a little better. And with
every move they make, they put another blanket over the Fire Within.
Maybe you once saw
something truly free that didn't care about consequences, and it blew you away
and turned on your soul's electricity for an hour.
Maybe you're sick and
tired of bowing and scraping before a pedestal of nonsense.
CREATE is a word that
should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of the smug
boredom of the soul.
CREATE is about what
the individual does when he is on fire and doesn't care about concealing it.
It's about what the individual invents when he has thrown off the false front
that is slowly strangling him.
CREATE is about the
end of mindless postponement. It's about what happens when you burn up the
pretty and petty little obsessions. It's about emerging from the empty suit and
empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital
bloodstream.
People come to the
brink, and then say, "I'm waiting for orders. I'm looking for a sign. I
want the signal that it's okay to proceed."
People pretend they
don't know anything about imagination, about how "it operates" (as if
it were a machine), about what it can do, about where it can go, about how it
can take them into new territory. They feign ignorance.
"I want to stay
the same, and I'll do anything to maintain that."
It's a test of
loyalty. Do you want to remain faithful to an idea that is just a small piece
of what you can be, or do you want to take the greater adventure?
The propaganda
machines of society relentlessly turn out images and messages that ultimately
say: YOU MUST BELONG TO THE GROUP.
The formula is
simple. Imagination transcends the status quo. Therefore, belong to the group
and avoid the possibility of transformation.
Or...REBEL.
No comments:
Post a Comment